


Desperate Men and Fools

by sanguinity



Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle, Strange Empire (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Western, Gen, Pre-Canon, Red River Uprising
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-25
Updated: 2016-03-25
Packaged: 2018-05-28 22:47:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6348703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanguinity/pseuds/sanguinity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“It’s bringing justice to a murderer, Doc,” Lock assured me, “nothing more. Strip away the politics, and we’re hunting a common murderer like any other.”</p><p>July 1869, and a surveyor has been killed in Manitoba. Lock and Doc are called in to find the killer, but find themselves at odds about whether they're on the wrong side of justice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Desperate Men and Fools

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gardnerhill](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardnerhill/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Welcome to Bakerstown, Pop. 221](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2082921) by [gardnerhill](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardnerhill/pseuds/gardnerhill). 



> This is a Holmes and Watson Old West AU, set in the intersection of _Strange Empire_ and gardnerhill's "[Welcome to Bakerstown](http://archiveofourown.org/series/285000)." Everything you need to know about anything is in the fic, so wherever you're coming from, you should be fine. Minimal spoilers for both 'verses.
> 
> Thanks to colebaltblue for her excellent advice and copious facts about horses, and to grrlpup for her support and edits. Any remaining errors are of course my own. 
> 
> Many thanks likewise to Gardnerhill for the invitation to play in her sandbox. I had a great time writing this; I hope y'all enjoy reading it.
> 
> Content warning for mentions of racialized violence.

I hadn’t been asleep but two hours when Lock took hold of my foot to shake me awake, but I woke quick anyway: there was never any telling what trouble he might have found in the night. From the looks of his grin in the weak light leaking through the shutters, he’d found the kind of trouble he liked.

“Wake up, we have a boat to catch,” he drawled, his hand still on my foot. It was quiet in the street, and judging by the stripes high on the wall, the sun was only just rising. “If you’ll consent to join me, that is.” Lock and I had been traveling together only two years by then, but I didn’t bother taking time to consider. Like I said, there was never any telling what trouble he might find. Sometimes it was even the kind _I_ liked.

I never had much liked the hours, though. I kicked off my blanket and reached for my boots, swearing at him for my lost sleep. “Where we headed?”

Lock threw open the shutters, and stood grinning at whatever he saw out there, off beyond the horizon. “North,” he said, and laughed as he dodged the boot I threw at him.

Most days it was hardly worth the effort to pry a secret from him, so I packed without further questions, he kindly fetching my boot back for me. But when he tried to hustle me out of the hotel without even a cup of coffee, I asked him whether the hurry was us running _to_ or us running _from._

“To,” he said, his hand eager on my elbow, and he didn’t say no more.

I dug in my heels, seeing as no one was planning on shooting at us right then. He had a boat to catch, after all, and while I liked to believe he’d tell me what we were about before the shooting started, believing a thing wasn’t the same as having faith in it.

Lock overshot me by two steps before turning back.

“Need to know a bit more than ‘north,’” I told him, reasonable-like.

“There’s coffee on the boat. The longer you stand here, the longer it’ll be ‘til you get any.”

“Can’t fault your logic,” I agreed.

Lock glanced up the empty street to the stables, then toward the docks, two blocks distant. I could hear the clatter and voices of the early morning traffic on the river. Seeing as we might be standing there a while, I pulled out the makings for a cigarette.

He laughed, yielding faster than I expected. “Canada,” he said, with a delighted twitch to his mouth. Seemed he’d been half-bursting to tell me anyhow.

“Canada?” I’d been expecting up the Missouri somewheres. “The boat even go that far?”

“I’ll tell you all on the riverboat, Doc,” he promised me, taking my elbow to urge me forward again, “if only you’ll oblige me by getting on the damn thing in the first place.”

“Seems you better,” I warned him, but I put away my cigarette makings and went.

 

We got the horses settled proper on the boat, his sweet-faced blue roan snuffling up to my stolid, army-surplus bay, then Lock found us a quiet spot along the rail to talk.

“Canada is in the process of acquiring a large tract of territory from the Hudson Bay Company,” he explained, as we watched the water eddy around the hull. “Over the summer, Ottawa sent out land surveyors to prepare for the purchase, and one has been murdered in the Red River valley. We’re to find the murderer. We’ll be taking the boat to St. Paul, then riding the rest of the way to Fort Garry.”

“And they sent all the way to St. Louis for you because why? No denyin’ you’re the best there is, but surely they have lawmen in Canada.”

“Ah, but no lawmen who can find this man! Red River is mixed French and Indian. A clannish, tight-knit people, the Métis, and they’ve been protecting the man. MacDonald doesn’t have an agent in all of Canada who can flush him out.” At my questioning glance, he elaborated, “Sir John A. MacDonald, Prime Minister of Canada. His personal request.”

I whistled. Lock had been making a reputation for himself lately, but that was a first.

“There’ll be money in this one,” he said, with a nod of satisfaction. “Ontario is howling for the murderer’s blood, and MacDonald needs to give it to them. His very government rests on it.”

I considered that, a mixed-blood Indian killing a white man, and the whole country yelling to see him hang. I spat to get the taste of it out of my mouth.

“Sounds like a lynching,” I said. We hadn’t been in Missouri long, and I reckoned Lock had never seen a lynching back east. Draft riots, might be, but not a proper lynching with lemonade and Sunday best. “Never much liked lynchings,” I added, to be sure he took my point.

“It’s bringing justice to a murderer, Doc,” he assured me, “nothing more. Strip away the politics, and we’re hunting a common murderer like any other.”

“If’n you say so,” I shrugged, figuring Lock knew his business.

Lock clapped me on the shoulder, then we went looking to see what sort of breakfast the boat could offer.

 

A riverboat doesn’t provide Lock the opportunities for fine entertainment it provides me, and consequently he was chafing for activity by the time we reached St. Paul. No sooner had his horse’s hooves touched the dock than he was off seeing to his affairs, while the more mundane business of gear, grub, and lodgings he left to me. I didn’t hear from him again until early in the second afternoon, when I looked up from my usual occupation to see his long figure in the cardroom door. He had a soft bundle under his arm, but when I asked about it, he only told me to saddle up, as we still had several hours of daylight for riding. I packed my gear and let him have his way, knowing I wouldn’t have no peace from him otherwise.

A fortnight later we rode into Centralia, a steamboat launch in the middle of nowhere, which is what I imagine they meant by the name. Centralia sat on the edge of the Dakota Territory, and between low water and trouble with the Indians, the steamboats hadn’t run for years. Fort Garry, our destination, lay another two weeks’ ride north, downriver into Canada. Lock disappeared again to make inquiries, suggesting that he might not be back that night, or perhaps even the next. I found myself a place in town I could wait comfortable for him, and only bothered getting myself the one bed.

Contrary to his expectations, he showed up in the small hours of the morning, not long after I’d retired. I cracked an eye at him. Sometimes an untimely arrival meant he’d brought trouble along with him.

He saw me looking. “Good night at the tables, I see.”

I grunted. He’d no doubt come through the saloon and read the story there. There’d been more than enough to see, after all: the objections to my winnings hadn’t been what one might call polite. The landlord hadn’t been keen on my staying on after that, but to my mind, some busted-up furniture ain't cause enough to switch lodgings.

“Shut up and go to sleep,” I told Lock, hitching over to make room for him.

Laughing quietly, he crawled in behind me, his long frame cold from the night air.

“Found what you were looking for, I take it.” Back early meant that it had gone well or gone poorly, and his mood was too good for poorly.

“Saw a man about a dog. Shut up and go to sleep,” he said.

I harrumphed, but did, his breath warm on the back of my neck.

 

There was a new bundle tied behind Lock’s saddle when we rode out the next day. I eyed it, and he saw me eyeing it, but he didn’t volunteer and I didn’t bother asking.

Lock could talk a mile a minute when he had the mind, but he rode quiet while we worked our way down the Red River and into Canada, thinking through whatever he’d learned in Centralia. His quiet was fine by me, as the trail was already too noisy by half. The road to Fort Garry was mostly a cart trail, and every oxcart could be heard a good two or three miles off, squealing and screeching its own distinctive tune with no regard to its neighbors. The curly-haired mixed-bloods who drove the carts didn’t seem to pay no mind, laughing and shouting among themselves, but the din set my nerves a-jangling. We were still a week out of Red River when I made the mild suggestion to Lock that we abandon the road and bushwhack our own route. Lock glanced at my face, then turned his horse directly uphill, away from the cart track.

He found us a footpath that wasn’t too much work for the horses and more peaceable than the road by half. “Suits me fine,” Lock said that night. “We’re still moving faster than any word about us on the road, and this close to Fort Garry I’d just as soon not be seen.”

That sounded like he fixed to sneak into Red River. I waited to hear what else he was planning, but he clammed up tight and didn’t say no more about it that night.

A week later, when we were coming up to the edge of the Red River settlement, he still hadn’t told me what he meant to do.

“Well?” I asked him by the light of the dying fire, in what was meant to be our last camp. Lock was stretched out on his bedroll, long and lazy, a cigarette between his teeth. The coal at the end brightened now and then. I could hear the horses grazing, companionable-like, off beyond us in the dark.

“Well, what?” Lock asked.

“Red River is an armed camp, the Métis have taken the fort, the last two men sent to find this murderer of yours were both run out of town, and the trail is already better than two months cold.”

I didn’t much like the first three particulars, as I was never all that keen on Lock getting shot at, if I could help it. The damn fool didn’t carry a gun, despite the fact that half the men we went after were too drunk to notice and the other half didn’t care a lick anyhow. The day I’d first clapped eyes on him, Lock had gone and got himself trapped in a barn with three men set on killing him, and I hadn’t noticed a one of them stopping to ask his conscience if he could shoot an unarmed man. Lock lived out that day only because I’d happened along with my own irons: one Moriarty brother was dead because of me, and the other would never handle a gun again. But if Lock wanted to walk unarmed into a town of riled-up mixed-bloods spoiling to take on the entire British army, I figured I’d see to it, one way or the other, that he walked back out again.

But the way I saw it, it was my last point that would be Lock's biggest difficulty in catching his murderer. Lock could figure out most anything just by looking at it, but two months on, there couldn’t be all that much left to look at.

Lock chuckled softly to himself. “I see you had time to talk to the good people of Centralia before the card game broke up, and the furniture with it.”

I snorted. There had been no want for talk in Centralia. The most popular sentiment demanded that the US Army liberate the Métis from the Canadians, and then the good river-bottom farmland from the Métis. “So how you figure on finding him?”

Lock flicked his cigarette into the coals of the fire. “I shall simply allow the good people of Red River to tell me,” he said, and slid his hat down over his face to go to sleep.

 

I woke the next morning to the smell of coffee and a stranger sitting in our camp. My gun was in my hand before I was properly awake, and I squinted at the stranger hard, trying to figure what he thought he was about, wandering into someone else’s camp without a by-your-leave. Then he grinned, and there was no doubt who he was.

“Damnit, Lock,” I told him, reholstering my pistol, “You’re gonna get yourself shot one day, doing that.”

“Hardly,” he said, unrepentant. “You couldn’t have been older than twelve, the last time you shot something you didn’t mean to.” He stood, so I could see his get-up properly. He wore a beaded vest and leggings—beaded with flowers, of all things—and a gray coat over the top, tied closed with a gaudy sash. A feather-trimmed fur cap sat askew on his head. I’d seen a few of the oxcart drivers wearing a get-up something like. “Well?” he asked me. “What do you think?”

“This may have passed your notice, a man as observant as you, but you’re too pale to pass as Indian.”

He grinned wider and a fluid stream of French passed his lips. I didn’t understand much of it. I spat to get the morning taste out of my mouth, and waited for him to be a little less pleased with himself and start making a little more sense.

 _“...non les gens libres. Je suis Canadien,”_ he continued. “Not Indian, but French. Gray capote, please note, and the sash is tied on the outside.”

“If you say so.” I trusted him to know the difference, but that was Indian beadwork he was wearing, and a lot of it. It couldn’t have been cheap to lay hands on.

“I don’t have enough Cree to pass as Métis, and they’re deeply suspicious of Anglos, but the _coureurs de bois_ are still trusted.”

I reached to pour myself some coffee. “Trusted enough that some beads and French jabber will get them to up and tell you who this murderer is and where he’s hiding?”

“Of course not. And yet they’ll tell me anyway.”

I didn’t see how, but I figured they would if he said so. If’n there was ever a man who knew his business, it was Lock.

Lock wanted time to circle around and enter Red River from the east, as if he was arriving from Quebec. I would never pass for anything but what I was, a washed-up Georgia gunslinger adrift and looking for a prospect, so I hung back in camp for another night, cooling my heels. Lock might get folk to trust him in his get-up, but nothing would get them to trust me.

When it was finally time for me to saddle up and ride into town, the looks I got were every bit as unfriendly as I had expected. I let Betsy amble down the street until I saw the dark speckling of Lock’s blue roan.

Lock had kindly picked a bar and dancehall for us, someplace I could fit in easy. Two tables of cards were already in progress. I marked him in the crowd—he was exchanging snatches of fiddle tunes with a small group of men dressed much as he was, some in blue capotes, some in gray—and I picked myself a game where I’d be able to watch his back. Then I set myself about discovering if Red River was so unfriendly as to refuse to take a stranger’s money.

Turns out, they weren’t.

The game was some French thing with a stripped-down deck and extra Jokers; I’d seen it once before, passing through New Orleans. I hadn’t done particularly well at it then, and keeping one eye on Lock and one ear on the talk didn’t leave me much attention for my cards, neither. But losing steady suited my purposes; I needed to be able to leave on Lock’s say-so, and big winners don’t get to slip away quiet. Another place, I might’ve worried more that I was losing so conspicuously, but I couldn’t see it mattered much here. I’d been conspicuous from the moment I first rode into town.

The talk around the table was a mix of French and English and some other lingos, most of it meant to go over my head. But as we played, I caught enough to put some things together about those surveyors and what they’d been doing in Red River. I couldn’t say it surprised me none that one of them had gotten himself shot.

Lock’s gestures became more extravagant as the evening wore on, his fiddling looser and more uncontrolled. Sometime past midnight, Lock said something in French, unguarded and loud, that caused a quiet ripple of tension to go through the room. I watched his companions question him, their body language not nearly as casual as their voices pretended to be. Lock responded carelessly, still overloud, and meaningful looks were exchanged behind his back. Not ten minutes later, when his attention was seemingly elsewhere, I saw one of Lock’s crowd pass word to another man, who quietly slipped outside.

I made a show of regretfully folding my hand, bade my compatriots good night—it is astonishing how friendly folks can be, when a man’s been losing steadily all night—and made my own exit.

Lock was already waiting for me, fiddle case in his hand, three buildings down.

Our quarry went on foot through town and down the River Road. We trailed behind until he cut into a dark farmyard. He slipped around to the back, out of sight of the road, and we followed, keeping to the shadows. There were sounds of confusion inside the house, the door opened, and after some quick words on the doorstep, he was ushered inside.

I could hear nothing from the house after that but a baby crying, which was quickly hushed. A few minutes later, the messenger left, returning the way he had come. Lock shook his head at me and let him go.

We waited quiet, and a quarter-hour later the back door opened again. A slim, trousered figure stepped out this time; he couldn’t have been much more than a boy. In addition to his gun belt—only the one pistol, I noted—he had a rifle slung behind his shoulder. His hat brim was pulled low, completely shadowing his face, and his dark hair hung loose around his shoulders, longer and straighter than on most of the men I had seen in town that night. He went to an outbuilding and emerged a few minutes later with a horse rigged up in the Métis style, the lightweight, felt saddle heavily beaded to match his rifle sling. At the road he turned upstream, moving quick. Not having our own horses, we couldn’t follow him in the half-dark, but I figured Lock might be able to track him come daylight.

Lock made a considering noise as we watched the rider go. “Now,” he said, “we wait.” He found us a place where we could stand quiet in the shadows for as long as we needed to, or at least until the sun came up.

An hour passed, my mind still on the talk at the card table. I trusted Lock, but I didn’t like the way this business was shaping up, neither. “In all that French jabbering,” I asked him, quiet, “anybody get around to tellin’ you what those surveyors were doin’ out here?”

Lock made a vague noise, his eyes still on the road.

“Marking out lots for homesteading,” I answered myself, when it seemed he wasn’t going to. “It’s a funny thing, but seems some of those lots already had farms on them.”

“MacDonald has promised that all land titles held under the Hudson Bay Company will be honored by Canada,” he said quietly.

It struck me that a man as smart as him might be expected to know a thing or two about politician’s promises. “These people look to you like they spend their lives passing around pieces of paper?” Barring the odd neighborly feud, I reckoned these people knew whose land was whose, but I doubted much of anyone else did.

Lock touched my arm, signaling for quiet. It took me near another minute before I heard the hooves for myself. Our rider turned into the farmyard, but when he dismounted I heard leather creak. Same horse, same rider, but different saddle: he wasn’t using a felt pad no more, but a leather ranching saddle. The rifle sling had changed, too. If there was any Indian beadwork on the new one, I couldn’t make it out in the dark.

Someone heard him arrive, and the back door of the house opened, light spilling across the yard and catching the rider full across the face. Not a boy, I was surprised to see, but a woman, full grown. Lock’s hand tightened on my arm.

We stood silently in our shadow as someone in the house called out a question to the rider in the yard. A goodly part of it was French, I thought, but maybe not all. The rider answered, and after another round of questions and answer, the door shut and the young woman led her mount away to the barn.

Lock tilted his head, listening to the soft rustle of work inside. Satisfied, he tapped my arm and signaled me to follow him.

When we were safely back out on the road, Lock turned to me in excitement. “Did you notice the change in saddle? She’s getting rid of anything that could identify her as Métis. She’s going to run, Doc, I couldn’t have asked for better. I still have one or two more things to see to here, you take the horses back to our last camp. We may have a long hunt ahead of us, and they’ll need the rest.” He turned to head up the road, away from the dancehall, the way the rider had gone.

“Lock,” I hissed, not liking him running about on his own, not with the way the town was riled up.

He put his finger to his lips, with a meaningful glance at the house behind me. Then he turned and stumbled up the River Road, shamming that he was blind drunk. As conspicuous as I was in this town, I couldn't follow him. I walked back to the dancehall to fetch our horses, cursing him every step of the way.

 

It was well past mid-day when he finally ambled into camp again, still wearing his Indian-beaded duds. He stopped to talk to his horse, she nosing into his hands while he whispered sweet nothings to her. I watched them from where I sat near the ashes of the fire, cleaning and checking over my guns.

When he came and joined me, I reached out with my boot and pushed a pot of grub toward him. “Eat,” I told him. It was clear he wasn’t looking to hightail it out of camp, which meant he had time to eat proper. If he thought the horses were going to have a hard few days, he would need his grub, too.

He ignored the pot. “Katherie Dumont,” he announced, when I failed to ask. He sounded mighty pleased with himself. “Scots mother, full-blood Cree father, although you can tell from the name that he has French connections. Both the French and Scots parts of town seem to feel protective of her, which I wouldn’t think you see too often.”

I reckoned it wasn’t because of her parentage, but because she’d shot a man who tried to sell their homes out from under them. But Lock didn’t need me to tell him that. “Eat,” I told him again.

He pushed aside the shirt I had draped over the pot to keep the flies off, and glanced inside. “Looks disgusting.”

I shrugged. It’d been tolerable enough when it was hot, four hours ago. “Eat it anyway.”

He ignored me and rummaged through his pack for some jerky, and I resigned myself to eating the remainder of the stew for my own dinner, if I didn’t throw it out for the coyotes first.

He lounged back onto one elbow. “They say she’s a crack shot. A bit of fire in her, too. Seems she rides with the buffalo hunt every summer. With the hunters, mind you, not the women. But this year she stayed behind, more’s the pity for one Mr. Archibald MacLeod. She gone and shot herself a man this year, ‘stead of a buffalo.”

I grunted. I couldn’t find much pity in myself for Archibald MacLeod. From what I heard, he’d got no more than what was coming to him. “Know yet where she’s running to?”

“South, I reckon, for the border. MacDonald wouldn’t dare send the army across the line, not with the U.S. itching for an excuse to acquire Red River country for themselves.”

“Not north, to her father’s family?” If she ran north, she’d be safe beyond our reach. I reckoned that not even Lock had the cleverness to flush a half-Indian girl from among full-bloods who meant to hide her. Not without him knowing a sight more Cree than either of us knew, anyway.

“She won’t if she has sense. The army would use it as an excuse to kill as many Cree as they could lay hands on.” He lay back, tilting his hat over his eyes, like he meant to have a nap there. Could be he was. I doubted he’d gotten much sleep the night before. “‘Sides, you saw her. She’s planning to pass for white, if she can. Not much point to that, if she’s headed north.”

I nodded. “Still leaves west.” East was unlikely, given who she was running from.

“Could be,” he agreed peaceably. “Could be. I say we let her run, track her for a few days, and then pick her up once she’s on her own.”

I nodded. Might be we could take this Dumont unawares. Might be also that Lock could talk her into giving herself up. He could do that, sometimes. Like as not, though, it’d come down to shooting. And if’n the woman had the nerve to hunt buffalo—and to hunt them in the Indian way, riding right in among the herd, not shooting from the safety of a parked train—then she wouldn’t face down easy. Might be she’d make me kill her before we could bring her in.

Lock slept, and I finished cleaning my guns. Then I took up my holsters, making sure everything was working smooth and quick and easy, exactly the way I liked it.

 

Two days out of Red River, Lock lost the trail.

Dumont had fled south at first, then cut hard west, into a mess of low hills and scrub woodland. Try as he might, Lock could not pick up her trail up again. After six hours of effort we camped cold, as high as we could find, against the hope of being able to spot her fire. It was no surprise to either of us that she was camping cold, too. The next day’s search was as useless as the first, and Lock’s temper turned foul.

“She’s good,” he snarled when we met up again, after a long day’s attempt to flush her out by splitting up and quartering the hills for her. “She’s very good, I’ll give her that.”

I was fed up with the business entirely, myself. “Explain to me again why we’re out here, Lock.”

He shot me a glare that was meant to be withering. “We are searching for a murderess. God knows what else you’ve missed today, if you missed that.”

I unhooked my canteen and took a swig. “Seems to me,” I said, ignoring his bellyaching, “people were defending their homes. Seems to me also, that oughtn’t be a crime.”

He glowered at the hills around us, like he meant to set fire to them. “Spoken like Johnny Reb,” he spat.

I looked at him steady. He knew my history in the War, why I had gotten in and why I had gotten out. I knew less about what he’d done, but I knew he’d worn blue. That didn’t always settle easy with me, but I figured he had to live with what he’d done, same as me. But if he had a problem with what I’d done, he’d plenty of opportunity to say so ‘afore now.

“I’ll overlook that,” I told him, “seeing as we’re friends.”

It took him a minute, but he finally nodded. “Much obliged,” he said, and I could hear he meant it.

I nodded, and quick as that, it was over.

He reined his horse away. “We’ll backtrack to that last town we came through. Put my ear to the ground, see what we can learn.” He was still brimming with frustration, that was clear enough from looking at him, but he was no longer chafing for a fight. Instead, his temper had steadied down into something that might have some use. My horse hardly needed the cue from me to fall in beside his.

After we’d been riding for a bit, Lock said, “Since you’re asking, Doc, we’re here to prevent more bloodshed. MacDonald will have to send in the army, the rebels haven’t left him a choice about that.” His glance at me indicated that his words weren’t meant as a dig.

Nevertheless. “Can’t be rebels when it’s not Canadian soil,” I pointed out.

“It will be,” he said, “there’s nothing they can do to stop it now. Probably never was, neither. However, I take your point.”

I nodded, and he went on.

“MacDonald can’t afford to let that murderer go free. There may or may not be bloodshed when the soldiers try to take the fort, but if they have to turn out every house in Red River searching for her…” He didn’t need to describe the scene: I’d seen it myself, with both blue soldiers and gray. I couldn’t imagine it’d go any different with red. “It’ll be more lives lost than just the two,” he finished. It was the first I’d heard him admit that the woman we were hunting would likely hang when we caught her. If I didn’t have to kill her first, that was.

After a while, Lock said, a huff of irritation in his voice, “I have never met a man with a gift for being silent as loudly as you, Doc.”

I shrugged. If he was hearing things, that was his own conscience, not anything I was doing. But if he needed to hear it said, I could oblige him. “They’ve taken themselves a fort. Seems to me a man doesn’t need to be as smart as you to know the army is on its way to take it back. Seems to me also, it only needs one person to spill a secret. And yet in that whole damned town, men, women, and children all, not a one of them did.”

“Might be that most didn’t know it to tell,” Lock suggested.

“Might be,” I allowed. “But a place like that, everyone knows everything about everybody, or near enough. Ain’t that how you got them to show you in the first place?”

Lock didn’t have anything to say to that, and we rode in silence the rest of the way to town.

 

Lock’s plan to put his ear to the ground consisted of the usual, mooching in and out of drinking houses and seeing who could be coaxed into saying something without realizing they had. I took advantage of the opportunity to replenish our supplies, and Lock came with me. The man who passed as storekeep and postmaster often knew as much or more than whoever ran the saloon.

The storekeep had only half-filled my order when Lock touched my arm. “I’ll meet you outside,” he said quietly, and sloped out the door. His manner was easy, but there was a coiled energy under the indifference: something in the street had caught his attention. He resettled his hat and ambled out of sight.

I watched him go, then mild as could be, I gave the proprietor to understand that I’d appreciate a bit more hustle. He hustled.

When I finally stepped outside, I found that Lock had gone no farther than the porch. He was slouched low in a chair tilted back against the wall, his feet up on the rail, cigarette in his mouth and hat slid low over his face, looking for all the world like he’d been loafing there for hours. He made no move to stir himself when he heard my step, so I joined him in his slouch against the wall.

“Mark that chestnut down the way?” he asked me.

Horse and rider were moseying their way out of town, saddlebags full, with yet more tied on behind the saddle. The rider was too heavy-built to be our quarry. “Beautiful animal,” I observed.

“Mm,” he agreed. “Métis buffalo horse, that.”

I grunted in appreciation.

“Funny thing,” Lock observed. “The rider’s a white man.”

I looked at Lock real quick. He was still watching the horse and rider. “You think Dumont has a partner.”

“She got that saddle from someone. In the middle of the night, too.”

“Lots of white men riding horses don’t belong to them.” It didn’t count as horse-thieving, after all, if you thieved it from an Indian. In my reckoning, thieving from Indians was more trouble than it was worth, but the West was full of desperate men and fools.

Lock hummed. “And yet the horse knows him. Trusts him, even.”

I considered that. “Could be—” I ventured.

“Ain’t,” he cut me off. “Doc, I’m not in the mood to argue the point, but if you find your heart set on defending the proposition that that man there won’t lead us to a rendezvous with Katherie Dumont, I’m more’n happy to give you the odds of your choice.”

I laughed. I enjoyed long odds as much as the next man, but I knew from long, hard experience that this wouldn’t be a wager I would win. There were bets I could win handily against Lock, sure, even ones he was fool enough to propose himself, but I’d been traveling with him long enough to know he wasn’t telling me a quarter of what he’d seen about that rider. “When we riding out?” I asked him.

He cut me a sly grin and tossed his cigarette into the dust. “As soon as we can retrieve our own mounts, I think. I’m not giving her another chance to pull that vanishing act again.”

 

I was pleased to see the rider was moderately careful of his backtrail, as I’d hate to think that a woman who could shake Lock off her trail was relying on someone too careless to take precautions. But Lock and I were even more careful than that rider was. We watched our dust and avoided the high places, not wanting to spook Dumont by giving her advance notice of our coming. We meant to take her quiet and easy, if we could.

The first sign things had gone haywire was the itching on the back of my neck. I heard the rifle shot even as I reached for my iron, and I felt the answering tug and ricochet at my gunbelt when the bullet struck. I snatched my hand away again right quick, not wanting to lose fingers, and Betsy, normally steady in the face of gunfire, shied at a bullet striking so close to her. I spent a precious two seconds wrestling her back into my control, and while I did, I heard, unmistakable, the shooter chamber her next round.

“Keep your hands clear and turn around, nice and slow,” a woman called out before I had Betsy solid under me again. Her voice was high, but I could hear it weren’t nerves, just her natural pitch. “I ain’t yet shot anybody in the back, but I would not mind too much if I have to begin today.”

I swore, but I held my hands clear of my gunbelt, so there wouldn’t be any confusion. I slid Lock a look.

“Bolt-action rifle,” Lock said quietly, as if I hadn’t heard it for myself. “On the rise we just rode under.” His eyes were still out on the terrain ahead of us. “And our rider’s gone, back behind that scrub.” Dumont had chosen her ground well: her partner had found good cover, but there was nothing we could use but the grass itself, not for a hundred yards. I’ve seen prairie grass tall enough to hide a man easy, but this wouldn’t.

That rider hadn't been leading us to a rendezvous, but to an ambush.

“And she took out my right iron,” I answered Lock, quiet, in case he’d missed where her first bullet had gone. If’n she and I got going, I could shoot faster, revolver against bolt-action, but she’d be more accurate. Especially so now that I was down to my left-hand iron, me still having a bullet in that shoulder from the War. The thing of it was, I could shoot faster, but she didn’t need speed, not with Lock unarmed. She could kill me with her next shot, already chambered and aimed, and then try to pick off Lock at her leisure. Lock might make her work for it, but she held nearly all of the cards.

The only good news was that she hadn’t played them yet.

Lock slid me one long, last look, reminding me we’d gotten ourselves out of tighter scrapes, and then he reined his horse around, nice and easy. I legged mine to follow, keeping my hands where Dumont could see them.

I would have sworn the rise was clean when we rode under it, but there she was anyway, just as Lock said she would be. The sun was behind her shoulder, meaning she could see us better than we could see her. Might be I could take her in a fair fight, but she’d gotten the drop on us clean, which was its own kind of fair.

Lock’s horse came to a stop a good few yards away to my right, seemingly by accident, too far from me for her to comfortably cover us both. “Shall I presume you looked MacLeod in the eye too, Miss Dumont, when you shot him?” he shouted. It was a blatant attempt to get her to look at him, but she kept her eyes steady on me.

“Hands _up_ ,” she called again, steel in her voice. “I can see the skinny one doesn’t have a gun, but I still want his hands where I can see them.”

“You’d shoot an unarmed man?” Lock called back, still trying to draw her eyes off me. At the edge of my vision, though, I saw him lift his hands from where they’d been resting on his pommel. Lock wanted to get her talking long enough for her to make a mistake or tire—she couldn’t hold that rifle steady forever—but provoking her into shooting him wouldn’t be part of his plan.

That said, if he was fool enough to get himself shot, there was no power on God’s earth that would get Katherie Dumont off that hilltop alive. I let her see that in my face, as clear as I knew how to show it.

“Bounty hunters don’t warrant being called men,” she answered. “And I don’t stop to ask if a dog is armed if I catch him in killing the chickens.”

“We’re lawmen, not bounty hunters.” I could hear amusement in Lock’s voice. “And I might call you many things, ma’am, but a chicken ain’t one of them.”

She continued to look down her rifle barrel at me, despite the fact that she was talking to Lock. “I don’t see a star on either of you.”

“We’re here on Prime Minister MacDonald’s personal commission,” he called back. She scowled, and I figured Lock had maybe given her another reason to shoot us.

“White man’s law,” she scoffed. “What good is that to me? White man’s law is for making white men rich.”

“The law is the law, Miss Dumont, meant for everyone, equal.” Damn the man if he didn’t sound like he meant it, too.

She laughed, low and bitter. “And if a white man had up and shot an Indian woman, do you think you’d be here now, on your precious government commission?”

“Is that what happened, Miss Dumont?” He pitched the sympathy in his voice to carry over the distance. “MacLeod drew on you?” She didn’t answer, and I could all but hear him doing that thing he did, where he looked at a room and could see everything that happened there. “No,” he corrected himself. “It wasn’t you he drew on. Someone else. A sister? An aunt?” I saw her fingers tighten on the rifle stock as clearly as he did. She was a sharpshooter, but she would never make a cardsharp. “Ah,” he confirmed, “an aunt.”

“You,” she said, meaning me, “take off your guns. Slowly now.”

I made no move, just looked back at her steady. She’d have to put a bullet in me first, if she wanted me to take off my guns. But she’d already tipped her hand that she’d rather not shoot us, and shooting a man in cold blood, while looking him in the eye, was harder than it looked. I’d met killers ‘afore her what couldn’t.

“If that’s so, you have a legal defense,” Lock continued. “We can help you find witnesses. You let us bring you in safe, and you can end this a free woman. No more running, no more hiding. We’ll clear this up at trial, and you can go back to your auntie, Miss Dumont. Make sure she stays safe. The army’s coming, she’ll be needing your protection.”

There’s a strange intimacy that comes of looking at someone along the barrel of a loaded gun, and I could see he’d lost her, just as sure as he’d had her before. She didn’t believe the story he was spinning, any more’n I did. She’d never face a jury of her peers, and she knew it. She’d face a jury of ours, and they’d hang her on principle.

“Tell me,” Dumont called to me. “Is your friend as naive as he’s making himself sound, or is he just a liar?”

I bared my teeth at her, friendly-like. I’d killed plenty of men for pulling a gun on Lock, and a few more for just talking about it. I couldn’t say I minded killing a woman, neither, especially not one who knew how to shoot. “You’re better off taking your chances with him than with me,” I told her. “Put your gun down now, and you’ll live out the day.” She’d survive today only to swing tomorrow, but I reckoned that was a separate issue.

She didn’t bother smiling back, but she didn’t need to, as she wasn’t bluffing her way out of having no hand. It was coming clear to me, the longer I watched her, that she wouldn’t mind too much shooting me. It was a warm sort of comfort to know she’d live long enough to regret it. If she shot me down, she’d spend the rest of her life, long or short, trying to shake Lock off her trail.

“You have the count of three, mister, to take off your guns and save me the bullets.”

I looked back at her steady, not intending to wait until three. Might be she expected that, but might be also she wouldn’t jump her count just because I did. I didn’t know where her partner was neither, but that’d come clear soon enough when the shooting started. 

It was long odds, but I’d never been squeamish of long odds.

“One,” she said.

We were interrupted by a baby’s squawl. She didn’t look away, but I saw her eyes flicker, and her finger spasm on the trigger.

In that moment, I knew two things, true.

First thing was that if she pulled that trigger, it would be because Lock and I had pushed her to it.

Second was that even with all the things I’d done, in the War and out of it, I’d never yet tried to put a bullet in a babe’s mother. 

It was a strange line to never have crossed, and yet there it was.

I sat good and still, watching her finger on that trigger and praying to hell that she was as good with her weapon as I thought she was. I heard Lock’s sharp inhale, and his saddle creak: if I’d been facing any other gunslinger, that baby’s squawl would’ve been enough to start them and me lobbing bullets at each other, and he knew it. But I kept right on holding still and prayed to hell that the lanky bastard would show some sense and keep himself sat quiet for once. Maybe that prayer was answered, because after that one creak, I didn’t hear no more from him.

Dumont took a breath. So did I.

We both took another.

“Two,” she said.

Lock had his hare-brained principles about not carrying a gun, but it struck me that his delicacy was a distinction without a difference, if I was just going to up and shoot any damned thing he aimed me at.

And me, I’d had reservations about this business since Red River. Since Missouri, if I was fixing to be honest about it. 

Out there, in the middle of nowhere, the wind stirring in the half-dead autumn grass, it seemed a good day to be honest.

Slow as could be, I reached for the buckle of my gunbelt. I didn’t look at Lock, not wanting to know what he thought of what I was doing. I had liked traveling with him, once.

And Lock... Well, he could still go after her himself later, if he wanted. He’d have to do it without me—find himself another gunslinger, or figure how to take her without one—but I reckoned that two years traveling with Lock might be the best a man could hope for in his life.

I undid the buckle one-handed, and lifted belt, holsters, and pistols clear of my horse. I gave it a good swing before I let go, making sure it landed clear of Dumont’s sightlines on us. 

One of the pistols went off when the belt landed, and Lock’s horse lurched. Dumont brought her rifle around quick to bear on him, and for a moment I thought the day would end with all five of us dead after all. I couldn’t much regret it on my account, and maybe not even the babe’s—babies died every day, especially out here—but it seemed a shame on Lock’s and hers.

But Lock just sat his weight back deep in his saddle and lifted his hands high while he waited for his horse to settle. After a moment, I saw her relax and breathe easy again.

“Jeremiah!” Dumont sang out, and the missing rider appeared. Turned out he’d been off to Lock’s side, not mine. He came forward, his own pistol drawn, keeping well clear of Dumont’s sightlines. He retrieved my guns, and then my horse. I thought Lock would revolt when Jeremiah reached for Lock’s roan, but Dumont shouted down, “We’re not stealing them. Not going to hurt them, either. Just taking them up the trail a piece. You’ll find them easy enough, if you’re half as good as I think you are.”

“And if someone should steal them prior?” Lock called back.

Dumont shrugged. “I’m not the one who woke up in the morning with the thought to go bounty hunting.”

Lock stared up at her a long while, she up there on her rise with her rifle still trained on him. Then he nodded and stepped back, and Dumont’s partner led his horse away. I breathed easier when he did.

We stood there and watched while Jeremiah turned our saddlebags out onto the ground, checking to see that we didn’t have any more guns stashed away. Then he found the beadwork among Lock’s kit, and I thought the whole deal was going to go queer right there. He held them up high so Dumont could see.

“You come by those honest?” she called down, her voice hard.

Lock didn’t much like being accused of stealing, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it. Wasn’t much I could do, neither. “Cash on the barrel, from a man down on his luck over Centralia way.” When that didn’t satisfy, he added, angry at being made to account for himself, “His luck was his own doing, Miss Dumont, none of mine.”

She finally nodded and instructed Jeremiah to let it be. He put the beadwork back on the pile, treating it a bit more respectful than the rest of our gear, and then the two of them left, taking our guns, horses, and saddles with them.

“At least she left us our boots,” I said, as we watched their rising dust.

Lock glared at me, then knelt in the grass to repack his kit.

 

It was five hours’ walk, the last three in the dark, before we caught up to our horses.

Lock didn’t have a single word for me, not in that whole five hours. Me, I figured I’d already had my say, and maybe a bit more, when I’d taken off my guns. I gave Lock his space, letting him walk ahead with the lantern to suss out our horses’ trail, while I followed behind, trying not to hobble for my blisters.

Even in the dark, Lock found easy the place Dumont had left the trail, just like she promised. A little while later he dropped his saddlebags and darted forward, those long legs of his eating up the ground, and I hoped Dumont had been true to the rest of her word, too. It’d’ve broke his heart, if anything happened to that roan of his. But I relaxed some to see that whatever her feelings about white man’s law and the folks who went around claiming it, she hadn’t taken it out on our horses. She’d found them a place with water and decent graze, and even taken the time to see to them proper. Even if Lock and I had been a sight longer coming than we were, they’d have been fine.

Lock was still cuddled up to his horse when I picked up the lantern to nose around for our saddles. I found Dumont had left my guns with them, which I thought was mighty white of her, although I wasn’t surprised to see she’d taken my ammunition. Lock didn’t seem in any hurry to move out and try to close up Dumont’s five-hour lead, so I hefted my saddle and carried it back to Betsy.

She side-stepped away from me like the sensible mare she was. I couldn’t blame her, as I wasn’t too keen to go anywhere else that night, either. But I figured Lock would want this camp, it being convenient to Dumont’s trail.

“Where are you going?” Lock asked, his voice sharp. I glanced at him, surprised to hear him talk to me at all, but maybe having his roan back safe had softened him up a bit. He still had an arm around her neck, his face shadowed by hers.

“Gon’ look for a new camp.” I hadn’t thought much beyond that. I’d have to buy ammo, which probably meant a town, and maybe a new gun, depending on how bad Dumont had damaged mine. Then I’d see where the wind took me. Maybe not right off, though. I was footsore and heartsick, and I figured if a dog could take some time to lick his wounds, I could, too.

“What’s wrong with this one?” Lock asked, venomous. He sounded like he was spoiling for a fight. I had wanted to part from him civil, but might be that had been too much to hope for.

“Dumont won’t be back tonight,” he went on, when I didn’t answer. “She ain’t got no need. It might have passed your notice, she already had the opportunity to do anything she wanted.”

I stared at him, gobsmacked he’d think it’d ever come into my head to be scared of Dumont sneaking back and slitting our throats. I had known Lock would be mad about me surrendering to Dumont, known he might be even unforgivable mad, but I sure hadn’t expected him to call me yellow for it. “I wasn’t going to shoot no babe’s mother,” I told him, hot.

“Don’t rightly recall asking you to!”

“That so? Well, I don’t recall your sweet-talking working so well!” I wasn’t much given to shouting. In my experience, shouting led to shooting, and I figured a man ought to have the strength of his convictions and begin a thing the way he meant to end it. But shooting Lock was never no option—not even if Dumont had left me my ammo, it wasn’t no option—and sometimes he tried my patience sore. “Just how were you planning on us getting out of that, if it wasn’t by me shooting our way out? _You_ might not have noticed, but she got the drop on us clean!”

“I’m well aware!” he spat. “And that was a damn fool thing you did, too! She came near an inch of putting a bullet in you!”

That time, though, I heard proper who he was mad at.

I cursed him, and my boots, and Sir John A. MacDonald. I cursed that baby, and myself, too, for being willing to shoot any damned thing Lock aimed me at. I knew what trouble Lock got himself into—I’d known that since the day I clapped eyes on him—and yet I was the fool who kept riding with him. Seemed I didn’t learn any better than he did. I stopped harassing Betsy with her saddle, and dropped it in the grass instead.

“A man so clever he gets himself trapped in a building with one door,” I muttered, knowing full well he’d hear me. “And just how the hell’d you manage to miss she was traveling with a baby, Lock?”

He made a frustrated, despairing noise. “I been asking that these past five hours, Doc. Too busy trying to figure where she’d run to. Or too pleased to learn she’d been within shooting distance of MacLeod to bother asking why she’d stayed home from the hunt in the first place. I stood right in that yard and _heard_ that baby, Doc, and I still didn’t think to ask.”

I grunted. I’d heard that baby and didn’t think no more about it, either, but I was more in the way of the guns of the operation, not the brains. And I reckoned Lock had been as surprised as I was to learn there was someone I wouldn’t shoot just for looking at him wrong. Dumont had tripped us both up, good and proper.

But it seemed maybe Lock didn’t want me clearing out that night after all, which was something, at least. Maybe we could still part civil.

Where I was standing was as good a place for my bedroll as any, and a sight better than anyplace I’d have to walk another five steps to get to. “You gonna stand there cuddling that horse all night?” I asked him.

Lock shook his head, but he kept right on leaning on that horse anyway, those long fingers stroking that roan’s corn marks.

I was laying out my bedroll—didn’t seem much point in doing anything else to make camp, not with the horses seen to—when Lock said, “It’s a funny thing you should mention the Moriarty brothers.”

I grunted, sitting down to take off my boots. The day we’d met, that had been, in the aforementioned barn with only one door.

Lock took his time saying anything else. I lay down and watched the stars, hoping to fall asleep before he got wherever he was going.

“If Dumont had done you like you did James Moriarty,” he said.

I nearly laughed to hear that was what was eating him. Lock didn’t mean the one I’d killed, of course, but the other one. James Moriarty had dropped his gun and surrendered, but I went and shot his hand off anyway, just to discourage him from coming after Lock again after. That yellow-belly hadn’t, neither, just like I knew he wouldn’t.

If someone tried that trick on me, though, it’d just make me mad. “You’d have to get in line,” I told him.

“Not much good at lines,” he admitted.

I did laugh at that, but I could hear the thing was still eating at him. “Wouldn’t’ve come to that. Dumont ain’t that kind of fool.” She might have killed us, but she hadn’t struck me as the kind of woman who went in for half measures.

“No,” he sighed, “I reckon she ain’t.” I heard him finally moving around, rummaging through his bags. He settled down not too far from me, and rolled himself a cigarette, taking his time about it. “Reckon she’s the kind of fool who thinks there’s still good in the world.”

It hardly seemed likely to me, her being an Indian and a woman both. Either one ought to be enough to know that most of the good had fled out of the world long ago. Fled, or been shot down where it stood.

Lock pushed up the lantern’s chimney and lit a cigarette from the flame. For a few moments his face was clearly lit, his eyes slitted narrow against the light. Then he set the lantern aside and turned the wick down, extinguishing it. All I could see was the glow of his cigarette’s coal, and the stars beyond him. “Reckon she might even be the kind of fool who’s right.”

I couldn’t make out his face, nor what he might have meant by it. I would miss him sore after he rode out tomorrow. “Shut up and go to sleep, Lock,” I told him.

He grunted in response, continuing to sit there and watch the stars.

I shut my eyes, against him and the stars both, and hoped he’d have the civility to ride out before I woke.

 

Lock was up with first light, but while I lay there quiet and listened for it, I never heard him ride out after Dumont. He checked on the horses, then spent what seemed an unconscionable long time building a fire for a man with a fugitive to catch.

When I smelled bacon, I cracked an eye at him.

“Drink your coffee before it burns,” he told me, not looking up from his pan.

I studied him all while we ate. Meantime, Lock pretended to ignore my scrutinizing, and Dumont’s trail got colder. When I could take it no longer, I finally asked him outright when he was riding out.

He raised an eyebrow at me. “I got no place particular to be. You?”

“You’re not going after Dumont?”

He sucked his teeth and considered the horizon. “See, it’s a funny thing, but I don’t rightly recall owing any loyalty to the government of Canada. Nor to Sir John A. Macdonald, neither.” He said the name different than he had back in Missouri, like he didn’t think much of how a _Sir_ came to be clapped in front of a man’s name. “It’s not like he and I ever shook hands.”

“What you fixing to do next?” I didn’t let myself hope. Him not riding after Dumont didn’t mean he wanted to ride with me.

“Need to find a telegraph office, sooner or later. After that…” He shrugged. “Figured you might pick this time, if you’d be so accommodating. Feels like I made a proper hash of this one.”

I breathed deep. Seemed to me a man couldn’t have felt more light-hearted, watching through his cell bars his own gallows being dismantled, than I did just then.

“Could do,” I agreed.

“Much obliged,” he said, and I nodded. If Lock was still feeling low when we reached St. Paul, I’d pick ourselves a six-day card game somewheres. I figured he wouldn’t have the patience for much more than two days, and then the old Lock would come roaring back.

Turned out, his stubborn streak held out for four whole days before he had me in the saddle again. He headed us for the Nevada silver boom, claiming he needed at least that much mayhem to chase away the boredom of watching me play cards.

 

We only heard Katherie Dumont’s name once more after that. It was that next summer, and Lock and I were up Montana way, passing through a little nothing town back of nowhere. He hung back to read a notice board outside the jailhouse, and when he didn’t catch up again, I circled back to see what had caught his eye.

There was Katherie Dumont’s name and picture, as clear as could be, although the artist had drawn her with a godawful angry squinch. I doubted he could have ever met her to draw her like that, let alone spent ten minutes staring up a gun barrel at her. Her Jeremiah was mentioned there, too, with just the one name. I didn’t see no mention of a baby.

What I did see mentioned, though, and mentioned prominent, was a thousand dollar bounty. I whistled.

“Seems someone talked after all,” I observed. Lock’s telegram, when he finally sent it, had said enough to put off the army from searching house-to-house for MacLeod’s killer, but not much more. I knew for a fact that Dumont’s name and sex had been nowhere in it. Me, I hadn’t talked, neither.

“It was only a matter of time,” Lock said, philosophical. “Someone would have slipped sooner or later. The trick of it was learning her name before she had time to move on and become someone else.”

“You think she did?” That poster had seen both sun and rain. I couldn’t guess how old it was, nor how much time had passed between us flushing her and that bounty being set.

Lock shook his head. “Ain’t no telling.”

I slid him a look. I thought he might have been able to tell, if’n he set his mind to it. He just didn’t care to, that’s all.

Lock took out his knife and started cutting that poster down from that wall, neat and precise. The local lawman saw him doing it and squawked, but Lock told him, reasonable-like, that he’d need the poster to collect the bounty. Me, I just looked steady at that lawman to let him know what I thought of people who got up in Lock’s business. That lawman wisely skedaddled and left Lock and me to it.

“Could use the tinder tonight,” Lock observed as he finished cutting that poster down, but I noticed that when he folded it up, he matched the corners precise. He took his own sweet time to neaten and sharpen the creases, then slid the packet into his breast pocket.

That night I watched careful, but I didn’t see it reappear when Lock made our fire.

“Reckon there’s still enough good in the world to stop what’s coming to Red River?” I asked later, when the fire had nearly died down. According to the newspapers, some political mess with London had held up the army over the fall and winter, and it had even looked like maybe they wouldn’t come at all. But then in the spring the mixed-bloods at the fort executed a white man, and the redcoats started marching in May. As far as I’d heard, they hadn’t got to Red River yet.

Lock shook his head slow, turning the question over. “I reckon there never was enough good in the world to stop that. That, or all the good’s been looking the other way.”

I grunted. It didn’t seem to me it had any business calling itself good, in that case, but it’d been a long time since I’d had faith in much of anything that wasn’t Lock himself. Might be that made me the same kind of fool Dumont was.

Lock flicked his cigarette into the remains of the fire, and sat there, forearms on his knees, staring into the coals. After a bit, he rolled to his feet and got his fiddle.

I sat and finished my cigarette, listening to the horses and the long, gliding notes of his fiddle as he slid the strings into harmony. Then I flicked my own stub into the coals and sat back to listen proper, not much caring what he played, just so long as I got to lay there listening to it.


End file.
